other temple under Heaven.... These Indians have the Gregorian
music at their finger-ends, and pronounce the Latin so correctly that
I could follow the music as they sang." Much has been changed since
then, for the church has been "restored," and the little band of
Indians have long since quavered out their last mass and gone to meet
their beloved pastor, the saintly Serra.

[Footnote 15: _Merienda_--noonday luncheon.]

[Footnote 16: _Enchiladas_ are a sort of corn-meal
pancake rolled up and stuffed with cheese and a sauce
made of red peppers.]

Those were _dolce-far-niente_ days at Monterey, dreamy, romantic days,
spent beneath the bluest sky, beside the bluest sea, and in the best
company on earth, and all glorified by the rainbow hues of youth. But,
as Mr. Stevenson prophesied, the little town was "not strong enough to
resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai which sprang up in
the desert by the railway," and after the coming of the fashionable
hotel the commercial spirit came to life in the place. The tile-topped
walls, hiding their sweet secluded gardens, gave way to the new frame
or brick buildings, the narrow, crooked streets were straightened and
graded, the breakneck sidewalks replaced by neat cement pavements,
and, at last, the Spirit of Romance spread her wings and vanished into
the mists of the Pacific.

The setting of the picture is now changed to Oakland, across the bay
from San Francisco, where we lived for some months in the little house
which Mr. Stevenson himself describes in the dedication to _Prince
Otto_ as "far gone in the respectable stages of antiquity, and which
seemed indissoluble from the green garden in which it stood, and that
yet was a sea-traveller in its younger days, and had come round the
Horn piecemeal in the belly of a ship, and might have heard the seamen
stamping and shouting and the note of the boatswain's whistle." This
cottage was of the variety known as "cloth and paper," a flimsy
construction permitted by the kindly climate of California, and on
winter nights, when the wind blew in strongly from the sea, its sides
puffed in and out, greatly to the amusement of the "Scot," accustomed
as he was to the solid buildings of his native land. It was, as he
says, "embowered in creepers," for over its front a cloth-of-gold rose
spread its clinging arms, and over one side a Banksia flung a curtain
of green and yellow.